‘Othering’, a favourite gerund in current academic-literary discussion, has yet to enter the dictionaries, but it shouldn’t have long to wait. Its status is well earned, if the...
Anita Brookner’s first novel appeared in 1981. Since then she has published it again, slightly altered, almost every year. It is a remarkable feat. Nor is it irrelevant to what she has to...
On the night of 30 January 1945, the former cruise ship Wilhelm Gustloff was sunk off the Pomeranian coast after being hit by three torpedoes fired from a Soviet Navy submarine. The ship was...
If Homer had walked the English soil in 1597 he would have felt that he had lived in vain. At that date no English poet had a substantial knowledge of either the Iliad or the Odyssey. Although...
This essay, in an earlier version, given as a paper at the conference on ‘Something We Have that They Don’t: Anglo-American Poetic Relations since the War’, organised by Mark...
Iris Origo, who died in 1988 at the age of 86, was a highly esteemed biographer and autobiographer, author of The Last Attachment (1949), about Byron and Teresa Guiccioli, his last mistress; The...
Pulled from my shell of dreams and noise, I was taken to live in a quiet place where the undiluted dark of the streets without streetlight, had no emphasis. Boys on boys’ shoulders turned...
Two Skunks Why, my dear octogenarian Jewish friend, Does the menagerie of minuscule glass animals On top of your TV set not include a skunk? I have been travelling around in America, Sleeping in...
Morning One house next next again pert green lawn white garage sprinkler muted nothing out of order no thing untoward wraparound sound, sigh of fridge door city tightening the mountains seem not...
The recurring theme of a life’s compression or diminution is reflected in the deceptive miniaturism of the twin stories in The Hunters. Messud labours on her two inches of ivory – and...
Postmodernism awards high marks for non-originality. All literary works are made up of recycled bits and pieces of other works, so that, in the words of Harold Bloom, ‘the meaning of a poem...
One day, in the early years of the 20th century, a poetically-minded young man from the Scottish borders called Christopher Murray Grieve walked to Ecclefechan, the birthplace of Thomas Carlyle....
I’d just walked up and down Vesuvio as Goethe did two centuries ago. At the bottom with a bottle of white wine I heard the great poet talking to Tischbein: Vesuvio puffing smoke out not far...
We live, so we are frequently told, in information-rich times. At least, those of us who live in information-rich places do. The glut is such that it isn’t possible even to make a fully...
This is not the Great Hungarian Plain But I can be almost content here in Turin Watching the sparrows at their dust-baths and the sun Splashing new factories with bright hard light – It...
for Will Maclean I House If the house in a dream is how I imagine myself: room after room of furniture no one could use; stairs leading upwards to nothing; an empty hall filling with snow where a...
Life is too short to read Philip Larkin’s juvenilia. Reading ‘Trouble at Willow Gables’ and ‘Michaelmas Term at St Brides’ is up there with stuffing mushrooms: there...
Born with a silver spoon, Malcolm Braly became a mouthpiece for the no-hopers and might-have-beens in America’s prisons. He was inside for almost twenty years and finished On the Yard...